Black Creek

by Dan Kemp

  He turned back toward the fireplace and held out his hand. Seconds later, a stream of fire shot from his fingertips and splashed across the wood, setting it instantly alight.

  "W—What?" She stood up and grabbed his hand. It wasn’t burnt, his skin completely intact. The heat emanating from the now roaring fire was very real.

  "I know," he said. "It doesn't seem possible. But it is. And I think I can show you how."

  Her father led her out onto the deck. The sun had fully set now, and the two of them stood together in the dark, lit only by the moon and stars above. He held his hands up again, sending an arc of bright, swirling orange flame off the balcony into the night air where it eventually faded.

  "You’re my daughter," he said, grabbing her by her shoulders. "This power has been with me my whole life. I am sure it must be inside of you as well."

  "I don't feel anything," she said.

  He laughed. "Neither did I, for a while. But that's just it—you have to feel. Feel the heat of the fire in your mind, focus it into your hand." As he spoke he held his hand up in front of her, and a circle of flame sprouted, hovering over his palm. He twisted his hand and the fire rippled as it spun about. Then with a flick of his wrist, it was gone. "You try."

  Emily held her hand out, the way her father had done. She tried to do as he told her, to feel the warmth of a roaring fire, to harness its energy and bring it to life. She tried and tried, straining, but nothing came.

  "I'm sorry," she told him. "Maybe I can't do it."

  He hugged her. "It's okay."

  Her father was gone again the next morning, as he always was. He had left a small stack of books on the kitchen table, most of which she had requested last time he visited. The cabinets were stocked with fresh supplies, and firewood was newly piled beneath a tarp outside.

  Emily felt shame for failing at what her father had asked her to do. In truth, she still could hardly believe any of it, but every evening she would sit in front of the fireplace, willing herself to do the impossible. Each time she would give up and strike a match. Otherwise, life went on much as it had these last many months.

  It wasn’t long before her father returned this time, less than a week. His silent entrance through the front door startled her as she was roasting some vegetables over her wood stove. He smiled his usual smile as she greeted him, but his face was one of thinly-masked worry.

  "Come with me, Emily. I'd like to show you something."

  They left the cabin, her father driving them in an old pickup truck through the narrow mountain roads. They went up and down, not descending but instead winding their way around the mountain. After twenty minutes or so, they came to a stop on a large rocky outcrop which leaned away from the mountain.

  A helicopter sat there, in the middle of the grass which covered the cliff. Emily was struck by it—a common enough sight years ago, but something she had certainly never seen since the world ended.

  Her father boosted her up into the passenger compartment before climbing into the cockpit. With a roar, the helicopter took to the air and the mountain fell away beneath them. The forest valley rolling smoothly along beneath them was a marvel to her, and Claire was transfixed by the view.

  "Where are we going?" she asked him, but if he had heard her over the loud wind and the spinning rotors, he didn’t show it. Whatever it was, she knew, it must have been important. Though she had not left the mountainside in over a year, even she knew that any type of fuel was now a precious commodity.

  The landscape below changed steadily as they flew. The mountains faded away and were replaced by hilly grasslands streaked with abandoned highways. At one point she could make out a group of men in cars and on motorcycles on the road below, staring up at the passing aircraft in surprise. Other than this, and the occasional sight of a small encampment on the horizon, there were few signs of humanity.

  The plains were not lifeless, though. As they flew over a lake, a herd of deer on the shore scattered in all directions, the waves turbulent in their wake.

  Not long after, as the sun was beginning to set, she spotted a man alone in the road below. He was bent over the engine of his car, a white van, which was smoking on the side of the highway. Apparently hearing the helicopter approach, he stood up and waved frantically at them. No sooner had she thought to urge her father to land than she saw them.

  Three birdlike, though wingless, animals crept through the overgrown grass surrounding each side of the highway, each converging on the man from different angles. They were at least as long head-to-tail as the man would be in height. The man continued to wave up at them, and showed no sign of seeing the beasts which stalked him.

  Her father, who before this had not taken his eyes away from the sky ahead, now looked over to the side himself, watching the scene play out. He met eyes with Emily and shook his head. Below, the three creatures leapt from the grass and set upon the man. His screams couldn't be heard over the whirring engine.

  Emily averted her eyes, trying not to think about the poor man. It was like her father had said so many times. It was not safe out here.

  They flew for a few hours, and Emily had just drifted off to sleep when they landed. The jolt of the helicopter touching down startled her awake. It was dark, and they sat on a concrete landing area. They seemed to be inside a small compound, with a chain fence surrounding the handful of buildings.

  Her father was outside, speaking to a man whom she couldn't see well in the dark. Next to her, there was a clunk as another man refueled the helicopter. After a moment, her father returned.

  "We've got a way to go still. You should sleep," he said. He retrieved a pillow and blanket which had been tucked away under the seat. She took them happily, and as they ascended, the soft vibration of the helicopter lulled her back to sleep.

  "Emily." She woke, her eyes blurry and her back sore. Her father was leaning over her through the passenger door. It was morning, and they had landed again.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes. "We're here," he said, and helped her down from the chopper. They had landed on a flat, sandy, beach. The sun was rising over the ocean, its light glinting off the placid surf. A breeze tousled her hair as she stepped out onto the warm sand.

  He led her across the beach and up a rocky hill where she had to climb using both her hands and feet. As soon as they crested the top, they came upon a crater. It looked to be a hundred feet across and the air above it shimmered and waved. An overpowering heat emanated from the crater itself, which was filled with bright orange lava. The stuff bubbled and slurped, occasionally spurting up a few feet into the air. She was still ten feet from its edge and felt she could go no closer, else the very air would set her alight.

  "I brought you all this way, Emily, so you can truly see and feel the power of the earth. To really harness this power, you must understand it. You must feel a connection to it, feel what the earth feels, inside of yourself." He walked closer, standing at the very edge of the volcanic lake. Her father stood tall and strong, his clothes whipped by the blistering wind as he held out a hand to beckon her closer.

  Emily hesitated, then took a step forward, then another. Every step was agony as the air burned her skin. Two steps away, she could go no farther, and tears streaked down her cheeks. She held her hands out, tried to focus her entire mind on pushing all the heat to her fingertips. She growled, straining.

  Still, nothing.

  "I'm sorry," she said to him, tears drying on her ashen face as they stood on the beach near the helicopter.

  "It's alright. It's not your fault," he said. Her father hugged her tight, but his face revealed a disappointment that hurt worse than the molten heat possibly could have.

  ***

  Her father was gone much longer this time. It seemed nearly a month had passed, and her supplies were nearly exhausted, before he finally returned. She was asleep when he came in through the front door, louder than usual. He crept into her bedroom, where she already was sitting up, awaiting him.

&n
bsp; He smiled at her, and sat on the edge of her bed. She scooted forward to sit next to him.

  "I have one more idea," he said. "But you have to trust me."

  "Of course," she said.

  "I've thought a lot about your situation. You share my blood, but few of my abilities. Yet by your very existence here, in this place and time, I know you share at least one."

  He stood, pulling a revolver from his jacket. Emily's heart began to race. "What are you doing?"

  He aimed the gun at her head and fired.

  Everything came to her at once. As she fell, blood dripping down her face and pooling on the floor, her father pressed his palm against her head. If the pain she already felt could get any worse, it did. All her memories, everything Emily was, fell away, leaving her stripped bare for the briefest moment before everything flooded back in.

  Thousands of lives played out in her mind at once, each of them wholly foreign and yet undoubtedly belonging to her all the same. These brief vignettes all ended with some different traumatic event, then complete amnesia and a new start as someone else entirely.

  She reached into the distant past, too, and there she could see her first life. Her father, yes, that same man named Martin Singh who claimed to be her father now, was there. Her mother, a woman shrouded in the fog of her memory. A younger brother. Their brief life together, in some nameless village in some long-lost corner of the world.

  She knew now, with the entire spectrum of her existence splayed out before her, that in so many years she had never attained this level of understanding. Countless lives, countless friendships, lovers, joys, heartbreaks, and deaths. As she lay on the cold wood floor of this lonely mountain cabin, her mind reeled, and she didn’t know who she truly was or who she ought to be.

  The images playing out before her began to fade, and everything was going dark. A dark empty nothingness reached out to take her. Her father, leaning down over her still, pressed down on her chest, and the darkness began to retreat. Then as the bone, sinew, and skin of her face began to repair and renew itself, she knew. She could, of course, be any of these people she chose to be. And, to her, that was no question at all.

  Jess

  Jess lay on the floor of the cabin, her face sticky from her own blood. In her head was the distant throb of a headache recently faded. She was alone, her father having taken his leave, as he always did after these few times he had reset her fragile mind.

  He'll be back, she thought as she clawed her way up the bedframe until she was standing. And I won't be here when he comes.

  Jess snatched her jacket off its hook and burst through the door, leaving the cabin behind for good. Her feet pounded against the gravel road as she ran. When she saw the path she had taken begin to turn upward, she left the pavement and descended the side of the mountain, scrabbling through the tall grass and brambles as she went.

  Between long strides, something occurred to her. Stopping her descent, Jess held out her hand and within her mind reached down into the earth beneath her. She felt that heat, that same raw, simmering power she’d felt that day by the volcano. Jess drew on that strength, taking just a bit of it and unleashing it herself.

  There, at the tips of her fingers, a spark of flame appeared.

  Dorian

  The day was gray and overcast. A cool, pleasant breeze blew across his forehead, a change from the oppressive heat of the last few weeks. Dorian waved at the guard atop the wall and the gates began to grind shut behind him. Though the land between here and the river was still fenced in, he felt a good deal more exposed behind the fragile chain link than he did within the town's high walls.

  He jogged along the dirt path, a narrow clearing made through dense forest, and the trees swaying in the wind menaced him on either side. The unmistakable throaty chirp-call of a raptor echoed from somewhere distant. The fenced area was only wide enough to accommodate the path, as well as the thick metal pipeline that ran alongside.

  Half a mile down the path, he went through another gate and passed behind the safety of his walls once again, though these were markedly shorter and less sturdy. A three-story brick building stood in this clearing, surrounded by a handful of smaller structures. The pipeline cut across the grass and entered the main building. A man, who had been bent over a curved section of the pipe with a spinning power tool, looked up and nodded as Dorian passed.

  Dorian found Kristof inside, standing between two large whirring turbines and holding some schematic or other spread out between his hands. He wore his black eye patch today, a cigarette tucked behind his ear alongside his green bandanna. A woman was standing next to him, looking over Kristof's shoulder at the same blueprint.

  "Alright, boss," he said, not looking up from his work.

  "How goes it?" Dorian asked.

  "Running smoothly, for now. Nothing that looks to need immediate repair. The men have made a list of spare parts we need most, to look out for on the outside."

  "Alright. You let me know of anything critical, I'll get the scouts on it."

  Kristof nodded. "Aye, sir. You remember Lisa, eh?" He tilted his head toward the woman next to him.

  Dorian hadn't recognized her, and in the woman he was looking at now he still couldn't recognize the dirty, starving girl they had found out in the wild just a week before. She wore clean, new clothes and a smile which only slightly dropped at Dorian's approach. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail.

  "Ah," Dorian said. "How's that working out?"

  "Quite well, so far. She’s a quick study." Kristof folded his schematic up and stashed it under his arm, the brow over his one good eye slightly raised at Dorian.

  "Yeah, well, no hard feelings," he said, glancing at Lisa. "If you pull your weight here, you're fine by me." She didn't answer.

  "Anyway," Dorian continued, looking back at Kristof. "I talked to Greg this morning, electrical work in town is ahead of schedule. Can we move up the grid blackout two days?"

  "Yeah, doesn't matter to me. I'll talk to him."

  "Alright, thanks. Anything else?"

  "Not at the moment," Kristof said.

  "Are you still testing the spillway today?"

  "Yeah, leaving soon. You coming?"

  "Thought it might be worth seeing," Dorian said.

  Kristof shrugged. "You're the boss."

  Soon after, Dorian followed as Kristof and his team left the power station, most of the men lugging heavy bags of equipment. Their path took them back into town, and they followed the water pipeline along its course, which took them near the front gates. There, as they passed by, a dump truck loaded with trash was exiting through the gate.

  Despite his group's combined expertise, the management of garbage had been an embarrassing oversight. They had sincerely underestimated how much of it even a small group could generate. For now, their solution consisted of driving big loads of it a couple miles into the forest, where they would bury it. Dorian suspected this solution wouldn't last them long, but they hadn't yet had time to focus on the issue.

  Their path took them all the way through the town to another set of gates, which opened onto the shore of Deep Creek Lake itself. The walls continued past the gate, running right up to the water and preventing any attack from the trees.

  The lake stretched on as far as he could see, and tall green pines were packed tightly along its edge in most places. Tucked away here and there were a handful of lakeside homes, all abandoned now. The water was clean and calm, one of the few unpolluted bodies of water Dorian had found. Out on the lake, a few boats sat motionless on the still water. He imagined the place had been quite a striking sight in days gone by. Even now, Dorian always had to marvel at it.

  "Remember when we stumbled onto this place?" Kristof asked.

  "I do."

  Dorian couldn’t well remember the time immediately after the cataclysm. In the ashes of the disaster he found his home gone, the apartment tower leveled at its midsection. Looting what he could, he made his way south. In t
his new world, Dorian had been in his element. There were, frankly speaking, simply not that many people left. While the weak fought over scraps, he flourished, assembling his own band of men and taking what he needed.

  It wasn’t long before Dorian and his men, on the run from a fight gone bad, had arrived at this very shore. Kristof, one of his earliest followers, who had been an engineer in another life—as he put it—recognized the unnatural stone wall along the coast to be a hydroelectric dam. As they soon discovered, water was funneled through a pipeline over a mile long through the forest down to the power station. There, a handful of inexperienced bandits who had occupied the place quickly met their end. The generators and turbines had been lifeless at the time, but within a week Kristof had them running. His men had cheered when a single lightbulb overhead flickered on, the first electricity any of them had seen in quite a while.